I think I'm losing where I end and where you begin
by TheGreatFlyingKiwi
Summary: "Derek Storm may not be as fictional as you think." A Castle spies AU one shot.


title: I think I'm losing where you end and I begin

characters: castle/beckett

rating: r

summary: "Derek Storm may not be as fictional as you think."

author's note: Well I was going to write this big Beckett character piece, all deep and emotional bla bla bla but then I just decided to write a Spies AU instead, because every fandom needs one lbr. Title is from the xx's song basic space, which everyone should listen to because it is basically aural porn.

* * *

He brings her a cup of coffee to her Budapest hide out.

That man is far too good at distractions.

She is still lounging around on top of the sheets naked forty minutes after he left when it hits her to check that the newly obtained flash drive is still in its case.

The bastard.

* * *

She got recruited out of university.

The agency must have a shortlist of angry almost twenty year olds with vendetta's against society. She cut her hair short, got a thigh holster for her gun, and became fluent in sealed envelopes, secret conversations in train stations and seven languages.

One way to get closure you could say.

* * *

The spy game isn't at all what she expected. The books tell of heated confrontations, high speed car chases through poverty struck cities, stacks of cash in sealed cases (these things have all happened to her at least once, but are not as glamorous as the movies like to make out). There is a lot of waiting. Days spent twisting her spoon around an empty coffee cup in an unsuspecting café, files and files stacked up on the counter of whatever apartment she is staying in that month for her to memorize, hours spent planning and perfecting strategies and the long subway rides waiting for her handler to join her with her next mission.

Then there is the thrill.

It is gritty, not sleek tuxes in foreign ballrooms but rented dresses and fake bank accounts leading to the Canary Islands. She is good at this game though. Her training mentor said she was a natural and with the motivation to be the best in the business. She knew how to play the game well. The seductive drag of her fingers up her thighs, leaving her opponent dumbstruck with her eyes and her dancing digits so she has enough time to slip her pistol out of its holster and put a bullet between his eyes. The roaring heart beat of the city as she threads through the backstreets on her motorbike just to cut off an informant as they try to escape. The sensation of a knife against her throat, and then the breath that comes after she manages to wrangle her way out of that situation for the umpteenth time.

It suits her. The anonymity, the false identities, the excuses to never stop running, wicked grin all the while.

* * *

She seems him first at a book signing in Venice.

Of course she knows his work, who with the most basic knowledge of popular fiction doesn't, and jeez okay maybe the in flight magazines are just too boring to occupy her on long journeys. Richard Castle stands tall amongst a mass of swooning women, stumbling over the native language but marker swirling across the pages with a flourish.

This is not a part of the mission, but she likes the way his tux jacket spreads across his shoulders and the spark in his eyes when he talks. She lets him come to her, men always do. Her silver slip of a dress that clings to her in all the right ways should be enough to entice him away from the gaggle of giggling women and to the empty seat next to her.

"Excuse me Miss, I am a bestselling author but you have seemed to have robbed me of all my words."

Bingo.

"Wow, do you make as much money out of your pick up lines as your books?" She swivels around and sets her eyes on him, roving up and down the navy blue shirt, shined black shoes and devilishly handsome hair.

"You wound me," his hand clutches at his heart and then he aims a winning smirk at her. "I didn't see you at the signing earlier, did you miss it? Don't worry, I always carry an extra pen on me." He pulls a marker out of his jacket pocket and moves to grab at the novel sitting at her elbow.

"I should make it out to…"

"Kate, you can make it out to Kate."

She shifts closer in her seat and slyly smiles at him, knowing the full view he will have of her chest from this position. He falters for a moment, sucks in a breath, then regains composure to scrawl across the page.

Oh this is going to be too easy.

* * *

They don't move from the bar for almost an hour (usually she likes to get to the action quicker than this but it is just so comfortable sitting her letting him enchant her with his words, hands making wild gestures, revealing everything about himself and her barely letting her last name slip). Her fingers trace patterns on the inside of his thigh and his shoulder brushes her. She knows he has gotten the hint, and knows his reputation for certain, skills, but seems in no rush to move their little party from the bar, choosing instead to stay lost in describing the quirks of his alcoholic mother. As much as she is unexpectedly entranced by his words, she decided he is talking far too much so she shuts him up with her tongue down his throat.

His room is on the twenty seventh floor. Turns out there are a lot of things you can do in elevator to make the time past when you have specialist yoga training like she does and his surprising upper body strength.

He fucks her loud and hard. Talks dirty in her ear. Plays her body like a professional, fingers moving relentless across her and teeth dragging across her breast.

She gave as good as she got.

God it felt good to be _noisy_.

Afterwards he rolls onto his side, trails his fingers down her side and smirks.

"Don't let it inflate your ego even more Castle."

"Call me that again, it's kinda hot."

"I think we've had enough fun for tonight."

"Oh Kate, we've barely even started."

* * *

She slips out of his bed at four in the morning, cracks the password for his laptop to copy the manuscript of the work in progress_ Eye of the Storm _onto her phone and sends them to headquarters to be decrypted to reveal the information for her next target. The only traces she leaves in his hotel room is the hickey on his neck, her perfume clinging to the pillow and a lipstick mark inside the front cover of the novel he autographed for her she left sitting on the bedside table.

* * *

The second time she sees him is by accident.

Totally an accident. How was she expected to know he was in Berlin that weekend? The Derrick Storm posters draped in the windows were easy to miss. No of course she didn't wear that deep navy strapless gown just so she could recognize the ridges of his fingertips as he brushed them across the back of her shoulders in greeting.

"Hello again Miss Beckett," he murmured into the shell of her ear as his hand came up to circle her waist. She turned around in his hold to place her hands on his chest, looking up at him from hooded eyes. Oh yes what a wonderful accident.

* * *

"I'm a spy," she tells him, her smile flickering in the pale moonlight from the window. It is not a first time she has told someone outside of the agency this. But this is this the first time that someone ever believed her. He is a writer, he already had the mystery written a mystery for her – she just had to fill in the details. Of course she doesn't tell him everything (she has had the rules about secrecy and loyalty drummed into her so many time she could trace out the exact words write onto his arm if she wanted). Instead she tells him of how it felt to fire a gun for the first time. The way the Arabian sun slathers your skin. The subtle body language of a politician who knows he is about to be assassinated. She describes to him the feel of adrenaline rushing and thumping through your body as you run for your life and why you don't look back. This is a game they play, feeding each other unfinished sentences and half truths. He tells her about his family, not about the helplessness he feels as a single father or the loneliness fame can bring, but about the bright smile of his daughter and his monthly poker nights with New York's best. She kisses him and it is all teeth and tongue and _oh don't let me fade away_.

(It is still dark when she tugs her high heels back on and slips out of the hotel room. He called her on making a run for it last time as her fingers skimmed across his chest, making lines in the dark. She had simply laughed and ran her fingers down his abdomen further, the muscles jumping under her touch)

* * *

A guy corners her in an alleyway in Vienna. She never lets herself get caught, especially not when he is a good two heads on her height and the knife clutched in his bloody hand makes her mind flash to other alleyways and women left slumped and bleeding for the cops to find but never solve. This is when it feels like the movies. Size is against her but she manages to get in a well aimed kick and throws him to the ground.

She still has to visit the nearest hospital under a fake name, hand clutched to her side. Another surgery scar to add to the patchwork on her skin.

* * *

His first letter arrives when she returns to her Baltimore apartment. The curls of the B and the slopes of the t's jump out at her and she doesn't open it for almost three days. She has no idea how he got her address but eventually has to resign herself to the fact they are both people with very extensive connections.

She eventually replies with a postcard from Cairo (from a set she had bought meaning to send to her father but instead they collected dust at the bottom of her suitcase).

_It is so hot here some days I like to walk around my hotel room naked._

_Too bad you're not here to make things more interesting._

_Beckett_

(While this is all very true of her last trip to Egypt, she can admit to just a love to mess with him)

* * *

They trade correspondence from all across the globe, his letters somehow finding her in the most obscure locations and her postcards being sent to that New York address she can basically recite backwards now.

She doesn't question it because there are so many things in her life she doesn't know all the answers to so what is the harm of adding one more thing to the list?

* * *

After she first saw the Nikki Heat silhouette on a bookstore's window she broke into his apartment, and stood waiting outside of his bathroom tapping her stiletto against the carpet impatiently against the carpet because _like hell _he was going to make pulp fiction out of her life.

"Holy shit Beckett! Wait did you scale my building to get into my bedroom window?"

"No Castle, you have a thing called an elevator and an easy to pick lock."

"Nah my mental picture of you groping your way up the fire escape is sexier."

She didn't mean to end up in his bed (oh his master bedroom is somehow much nice than those five star hotels, figures). First she was yelling and throwing accusations at him and then she was twisting her fingers through his hair and he was pulling the buttons of her blouse undone.

It may have been halfway to her third orgasm when he whispers the plotline for the second Nikki Heat book in her ear that she gives in to the idea. Because nobody knows it's her, and what she read on the way over to his apartment was actually kind of good and she really wants to act out that sex scene on page 105.

* * *

She can't stay in New York too long, but she stays for breakfast and that is enough for him.

* * *

The fourth time they meet is not planned.

She had just met with her handler. There was a new objective, a new target and new ally (what were allies in this business though, Sorensen had left her bleeding out on top of a Dubai sky scraper, she had abandoned Demming in the middle of Chinatown when she spotted they were being tailed and who knows what happened to Davidson after she used his name as bait for an Irish drug lord). The name of a café was scribbled on the back of the New York Times and the password running on loop in her head.

Oh what the _hell _is he doing here? Wait how did he get the US flag pin, why he is smirking at her like this is just another rendezvous for them?

"I called in a favor from the boss and had us assigned for more tasks together."

He smirks at the confusion on her face.

"You would be surprised how many levels of clearance I am above you Beckett."

She continues to gape.

"Derek Storm may not be as fictional as you think."


End file.
